… Winton’s Australians were the people who are nowadays referred to as ‘true blue’ uneducated, native-born, working-class Australians of Anglo-Celtic origin. … The class of which Winton writes was insular, self-contained and confident of the belief that they were indeed the fair dinkum Australians, and that no one but they had the right to make such a claim.

As Alex Miller says in his thoughtful introduction:Ĭloudstreet is the greatest Australian novel ever to have been written about the iconic and rapidly disappearing class of white Australians who gave the people of this continent its reputation as one of the finest and most generous-hearted on the planet. Set in Western Australia as it emerges from World War II, the book is now remote in time and sentiment from affluent contemporary Australia because it depicts a lost world – a world of grinding poverty and hardship and an idealised value system which is long gone. It’s the story of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs, both beset by disaster but responding to it in different ways. I bet there’s many an Aussie author who groans in dismay to find his/her book released in the same year as a Winton, because he tends to blitz every award there is, with a corresponding impact on book sales.Ĭloudstreet is the book that made his reputation. Winton has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders (1994) and Dirt Music). Which is really rather contrary of me because he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times – for Shallows, (1984) Cloudstreet, (1992) Dirt Music (2002) and the only one I’ve reviewed here, Breath (2009). It wasn’t my first Winton, that was That Eye, the Sky which I read in 1986, and I’ve read all Winton’s major novels, even though I’ve never really taken to his writing. I first read Cloudstreet some time in the 1990s. I don’t want to provide content for lazy plagiarists. However, I have to be careful how I write this… Cloudstreet is set as a school text all over the country. They are so elegantly crafted, so beautifully illustrated and such a pleasure to handle! But I also wanted to revisit Cloudstreet because the book is now over 30 years old, and an Aussie classic. But because the blogosphere and the rest of the media is awash with reviews of Eyrie, I jumped at the chance to do something different: I’ve been reading a new edition of Winton’s earlier work, the iconic Cloudstreet, now available in a sumptuous Folio Society edition.

As everyone knows, Tim Winton has a new novel out this year: it’s called Eyrie, and of course I have a copy and will get round to reading it in due course.

Cloud street tim winton